from The Philadelphia Inquirer, Commentary Section

By Jennifer Snead

January 1, 2002

Better odds, or a sucker bet?
In New Jersey, lottery habit has grown to twice a day

A flying saucer crashes on the outskirts
of Roswell, NM. The cynics catalogue of its remains:
scraps of tin foil, some sticks, shredded wallpaper.
And the town's now universal news --
galactic espionage, government coverups, prime
destination for pilgrims of the paranormal.
Saucers, flying. A field of household debris, dreams.
Small matters matter; the elevation of the ordinary.

So too lotteries. Ordinary numbers the extra
ordinary, daily. (Twice daily now in Jersey.)
A birthdate, an anniversary, a random guess might be
like spacecraft, or any other way out, up.
Everyone has at least one that's lucky:
a phone number, steps between stairwells.
Repetition rules. The thousandth time, wrote a poet,
may prove the charm. Mystical ubiquity!
Faith is like that. It's a sucker bet, a gull's
heuristic. The odds ridiculous, more fragile
than joyriding aliens in a tin foil ship. And we know it.

Jennifer Snead is a recent PhD who teaches in the University of Pennsylvania's English Department and works at the Kelly Writers House.